Many Sunflower Broadband customers were without some of their favorite channels Friday morning.

According to Sunflower, a piece of hardware failed at 3 a.m. at its headend and repairs have not yet been successful. Engineers have been working on the problem since it occurred, Sunflower said.

"We've made some progress with Motorola in regards to the equipment that failed. We hope it will be back online soon," Sunflower Broadband General Manager Rod Kutemeier said. He said he hoped everything was back up and running without problems in the next couple of hours.

Sunflower said that the outage was concentrated most heavily among standard definition digital channels, and most high definition and all analog channels were still available.

"This is very rare," Kutemeier said. "There was a planned maintenance event last night, that had nothing to do with this piece of equipment, so figuring out the problem took longer than we would have liked.

The specific channels that were available was changing rapidly as of about 10:15 Friday morning. Though channels like CNN were available earlier, that has since changed. And other channels that had been out, were now back. Sunflower officials said that they couldn't say with certainty what channels would be working in the future.

"We really apologize for the inconvenience," Kutemeier said.

Sunflower Broadband is owned by The World Company, which also owns The (Tonganoxie) Mirror, Eudora News and Basehor Sentinel.